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Routine testing offers help to osteoporosis patients

bone scan
Bone scan
 
April 8, 1998
Web posted at: 7:19 p.m. EDT (2319 GMT)

From Medical Correspondent Rhonda Rowland

ATLANTA (CNN) -- By the time they reach 50, most women know they should be getting yearly mammograms to detect breast cancer. But soon, they may be adding another test -- one for osteoporosis, a condition that makes bones dangerously thin.

Indeed, a woman's risk of dying from complications resulting from a hip fracture is equal to her risk of dying from breast cancer.

"In my opinion, we will reach a time where every woman will be having a bone test sometime around menopause," says Dr. Nelson Watts of Emory University.

Scientists are learning more about the causes of osteoporosis. In a study recently reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers said they discovered a second gene that contributes to osteoporosis.

"This is a second big piece in a puzzle of the hereditary factors that contribute to osteoporosis," says Watts. "The investigators looked at chromosomes, or genetic material. The genetic material in this case sends the signal to make collagen, which is the framework of bone."

Stoddard and Mullen
Fannie Mae Stoddard, left, and her daughter Julia Mullen
 

Although medical science is not yet at the point where people can be genetically screened for osteoporosis, most bone experts now agree that people who have a mother, sister or father with the disease should at least be screened with a bone density test.

That was the case for Julia Mullen, whose mother, Fannie Mae Stoddard, has the condition. Stoddard has broken a shoulder and suffered several falls. She has also shrunk eight inches.

When Mullen went in for a bone scan two years ago, the test showed that she had already suffered some loss of bone in her back. But because of new drugs, it is unlikely that Mullen will suffer as her mother has.

Her latest scan shows not only that her bone loss has stopped, but that it is actually reversing.

 
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